When I'm not scrolling through TikTok, I'm probably speedrunning Minecraft or
Super Mario 64. But when I'm not doing that either, I make things. Most productive Gen-Z kid
amirite? The trick is to have Subway Surfers running on one of my four screens💀
But seriously, building stuff is awesome.
I'm maintaining a very selective list of some of the things I've built. So I'm not including stuff like my embarrassing Club Penguin YouTube channel, the physics/sci-fi comic-strips I drew for my imaginary science magazine, random Discord bots or a simple no-code website-maker I made in 2013. Nah actually, I'm kinda proud of that last one - it was the first "software" I built and shipped. I was 13, had no mentors or knew anyone who wrote code, and taught myself how to write basic Visual BASIC (lol) from a random website I found. I didn't even realise you could use YouTube to learn programming back then, I mostly used to buy or download textbooks for that stuff.
Marketing tool for WhatsApp - easy bulk messaging, 'Share on WhatsApp' URLs, texting unsaved numbers etc.
Calculator and visualizer for how much time one could save in the new decade.
Objective: AI model that generates anime from manga. Not yet achieved.
A 3D visualization of English vocabulary; a visual thesaurus. Vectorized 30,000 common English words and used t-SNE to reduce them to 3-dimensional vectors.
Translation of physical modalities to textual and visual art.
(read as SummarEyes) Search inside a YouTube video. I'm currently rethinking form factor and UX for this utility for a different idea.
Low cost electronic circuit that automatically reduces headlight intensity in the presence of oncoming traffic to reduce glare and try decrease accidents due to the Troxler effect.
Using zero-knowledge proofs to do things with your internet history while respecting your privacy
A crypto wallet with social features like the ability to search for addresses or ENS and view their NFTs and other tokens.
Utility to get a webpage's preview and metadata. Features like a metadata previewer and a REST API endpoint.
Ephemeral group chat (aka a lightweight IRC) that looks exactly like WhatsApp (complete with dark & light themes) with some Discord inspiration. Features like rooms, online members list, welcome & goodbye messages etc. This was for a lab requirement in my DOS class where we had to make a simple client-server chat. Did that in 5 minutes of hacking and decided to keep adding stuff to see how ridiculously over-the-top I could make this with a few more hours.
A web-first recreation of the magic of physical parties. I really like this idea and wanted to go all in on it but I believe building successful modern social apps requires certain things like a specific founding team and specific geography (too much to explain over here). I also realised that there are more important and interesting things for me to work on in this decade. Having said that, I'm open to working on it again if it's the right time and place.
A more capable question-answering system than ChatGPT (at least the ChatGPT of January 2023). The tool was able to autonomously do math and use recent news to answer questions - something ChatGPT couldn't do back then. ChadGPT was made redundant eventually when Bing Sydney and AutoGPT arrived on the scene.
Electronic device that aimed to eliminate waste power consumption by redundant lighting.
A breakdown I wrote in 2019 of a viral tweetstorm: Erik Torenberg on How To Be Successful
A simple static site I hacked together in 2020 that won first place in a Replit hackathon: Shawn's Trajectory
A how-to Buildspace asked me to write in 2022: Build a GPT-3 app to write really good DMs
bruh, fr? it's 2024, get out of here (jk ily). never needed to make a resume in my life lol
If you're that bored, check out my 404 page instead lol. I had to redo some of the math behind the warping stars from the main page just to make it work here even though barely anyone is ever going to see it.
I am very excited about where we're headed as a species with technology and feel a great sense of urgency to contribute to that in much more meaningful ways. This means that the projects I do naturally become higher commitment and longer term. I hope to see some of these projects taking the form of venture scale startups and contributions to scientific research. I don't know the specifics yet; all I can say is that the future looks very, very exciting!
Slide into my Twitter DMs 👀 or email me at: my first name @ recurshawn.com
Or you could just stalk me on Twitter, GitHub or LinkedIn. 🌝